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Er, ok, so to help the .1% of signups coming from journalist or bloggers, we add a checkbox that's out of place and irrelevant to the 99.9% of actual potential users which could have the negative effect of losing signups from having some weird checkbox asking if they're a blogger or journalist?

Try to imagine if vimeo or YouTube, tumblr, Facebook, or absolutely any site that implemented this in their signup form. It just plain sounds dumb. User signups are supposed to be as frictionless as possible.

What a selfish idea that only serves the author and the small percentage of similar people at the expense of the interests of the businesses they intend to write for.

Or is the author just being facetious?

From a user's perspective, the site loads quick and displays fine. Would there be any particular reason that would motivate the programmers of Subway.com to clean up their code or reformat it in a more efficient way?

Short answer: this is "agency" UX. If you want to work in a startup, then 90% of what you're learning is useless. You're learning traditional practices that put emphasis on planning. Startups generally need to put emphasis on speed and flexibility and adaptation to change. For that, you might benefit from learning how to rapidly prototype with actual code and when creating UX documents, stick to what you know is important and necessary and cutout 90% of the bloat that traditional UX people design for.

I have much respect for the company, but I hate to say that I did not want a single one of their concepts. Every screen change, the only thing I could think was, "ok, now how do I go back to that previous screen?" every new screen showed a completely new confusing interface with non-intuitive interactions. And some screens were just plain poor usability. Example, the book browsing screen where you swipe left and right to browse book covers one at a time. Repeat...one....at....a....time. How about showing me a grid or list so it'll be easier for me to decide which of my 50+ books I'd like to read?

Perhaps you could take it one step further from karaoke and put an American Idol spin on it. Competitions, prizes, Internet fame. If you could somehow pull in a celebrity partner or sponsor, this could become an even greater possibility.

Even better when you have friends with the same M.U.L.E nostalgia to play with. My favorite was monopolizing the market on food to make all the other players starve and pay me crap tons of money just to eat.

I have an idea that I want to throw out there. I haven't fully thought it out, so I'm sure it would have drawbacks.

But what if one were able to earn karma points by interacting with the "new" page. The details could be worked out to make it un-"gamable", but the basic premise is to reward users that put more effort into discovering posts in the waterfall of the "new" page.

Of all the things pointed out in the article, this is the one single thing that I could not see a reasonable defense to, and he didn't even mention this as one of the problems!

When a launch is imminent and you are a CO-FOUNDER, and you take a vacation, this is grossly irresponsible. The whole "life happens" comment he uses as a minor defense to it, well....guess what? Work is a part of life too! We juggle work, home, family, friends, hobbies, etc etc all the time, and it's up to us to be responsible on deciding which gets priority at any given time. While one aspect is more important to each of us, there will always be times when something trumps it, regardless of category. And well, a launch of your business compared to going on a honeymoon? Yes, absolutely that trumps it!

A honeymoon can be postponed. I've had many friends that postponed it an entire year! Sorry, I simply cannot find justification for this single act alone.

I think many of the use cases you list on the front page are a bit of a stretch. The To Do list for example, there's already hundreds of different ways people keep their to do lists, and I can't see any advantage of keeping one here over my own way. You might want to consider distilling down the use cases to a handful if not one or two very strong use cases and focus on those. It's much harder to market to everyone rather than specific user types. If you try to speak to everyone, the message gets very watered down, but if you try to speak to one specific user type, i.e. Moms, the message is direct and relevant.

Just want to add that of course, you'd be able to integrate food ratings, friending, favoriting, etc etc etc all that standard social stuff, but IMO, in order for this to be successful, you should consider boiling it down to the absolute simplest of functions and tasks to minimize user friction.

So with the above idea, I would recommend the user need only simply 3 things: 1) photo 2) restaurant 3) whether they liked it or not and an optional 4) description.

If it's an iPhone app then you automatically pull geolocation, but if it's through email, I'm not sure how this would be done and you'd have to explore what you can do.

Allow me to offer you an idea:

When I go to Yelp to search for a restaurant, the filters I have available are type of restaurant, proximity, rating and price. My next step is to either sort by those filters, or individually click a restaurant. Looking at an individual restaurant, my options for consideration are photos of the restaurant, consisting of either interior/exterior or images of the food, and user reviews. The user reviews consist of reviews about the service, atmosphere and food, but I have to chug through each review to get this type of specific information. And with a task of choosing a restaurant and having to repeat these sets of actions is immensely tedious.

What's missing?

A way to discover restaurants near me that I can discover by their actual dishes. The user flow would be this -> I'm in the mood for a burger. Show me restaurants that serve burgers. I get a range of places from diners to more high-end to delis and more, but instead if getting a list of joints, I get a sortable grid of user's burger photos from places near me. Then, all I need to do is say, that burger is the one I want and, barring other misc info such as price or needing reservations and what not, I will go there and get the burger that I saw with my own eyes.

The advantage you will have over Yelp is that While Yelp provides a way to discover restaurants by very general filters, you will provide a way to directly discover restaurants by the actual individual dishes.

As a side note, think about when you go to a restaurant and get a menu that has pictures. It gives so much more reference to choosing a dish, because the mystery is taken out of the equation. Your service would do exactly this. Remove the mystery of what you're going to a restaurant for.

Also, while you can see some food items on Yelp in the individual restaurant pages, #1 they come with no context and #2 I can only access these photos on these individual pages which is tedious.

There you have it.

I would actually take this argument even further and add an understanding of good UX with a sprinkle of business knowledge. Without the UX, a designer has no basis on what works for each particular type of user, and without a basic understanding of business, the designer will lack the understanding of what and why they're actually designing the thing they're designing.

I dunno. That setup looked pretty darn expensive. Did you see the number and size of all of the pieces involved? Custom etched and built models. Huge amounts of high-powered explosives. Not to mention the cost of the film. I don't mean to undercut your point of finding creative solutions, but I'm not sure this is a good example.

Just a tip, if someone tells you that something is unclear to them, a response just telling them that you don't know why it's unclear to them is both unhelpful to that person as well as to yourself.

I also find the homepage unclear as to what everything is and why I would use it. I basically think you need one clear message rather than a rotating message, plus screenshots or links to live or demo "sprreds". You can also consider a demo video, ala Dropbox's homepage, that explains in a fun way what you offer.

Accessing it from my iPhone and I don't see a link to register. Is that just for the mobile version of the site?

True, what they have is pretty darn close. As long as it offered me TV and Movie level content and gave me a custom-tailored feed based on what I like.

Oh, one other thought. Add Korean dramas and you will OWN the entire female asian market. They're easy to find on several sites, but completely non-existent on internet/tv solutions. Additionally, it's next to impossible to explain to our Asian mothers how to load up a webpage, select a tv show with a drop-down or in a list, and then click through the episodes. It's information overload to them and they simply don't do it. But if they had this on a simplified internet/tv interface ala XBMC or Boxee, it just might do the trick.

I'd like to offer what I believe is the humongous missed thinking on every product like this and any service that aims to mix internet and TV. Maybe it's been done and I've somehow missed it. But I'd like to call it the Stumbleupon feature.

All of these services ask me to think about what I want to watch. But there's this thing that we all do, and I absolutely think there isn't a single person that doesn't do this, and it's called "channel surfing". You just flip and flip and flip to see if there's something more interesting than you're currently watching, or you've just finished watching a program and you want to explore your options.

Stumbleupon provides exactly this, but much more. Stumbleupon is purpose-built specifically for boredom, and over time tailors itself to you. Next, next, next, ohh that's cool, next, next, next. That's exactly what I want from a TV experience. Additionally, I'd be able to save and share with friends.

An example of how this feature would differentiate itself from current methods is, I like a lot of TED videos, but there's also a lot I find incredibly boring. With current interfaces, I have to click a TED category and then sift through all of their offerings. And how the heck would I even know if I'll like something until I play it? Blegh! The Stumbleupon feature would know what type of content I like, and would be able to pull out TED videos that it thinks I would find interesting, and all I would have had to do was click "Next", and it would eventually be presented to me.

That's all I got to say. Add a dang Stumbleupon feature, and an internet-tv box will be MONEY.

Great simple advice. Nike sums it up even shorter with "Just do it." And if you read between the lines, it says "Don't think." I'm not saying don't think at all of course, but one of the biggest things that keeps someone from getting started is overthinking. Overthinking what's needed, how much, how hard, what will happen if this, or that, when's the right time, what if it's a waste of time, and on and on.

Their second piece of advice that they infer in the article is the best way to learn is by doing. Because that's another big obstacle to starting, believing one is not prepared to get something done, and that the person just needs to learn a bit of knowledge before he or she gets started. Just start and learn along the way. How else did we learn how to walk when we were babies?

Maybe unrelated, but I give a vote for the brain perceiving things in a hyper-active state. When I go high-speed go karting, my brain needs to work incredibly fast to keep up with every little thing going on. In between sessions, if I play games on my iPhone, it is literally like the game is being played in slow motion. Alternatively, if I wake up in the morning all drowsy and I play those same games, it's as if the games are in fast forward and I can't keep up. So it's obvious my brain is in different states of awareness in these two scenarios, so it would make sense that in a near death experience, the brain jumps into that hyperactive state and things appear slower. Just my opinion.

Really realy minor, and not related to my personal distate of flash, but while your the tool loaded, the loader bar filled in from left to right as any loader would, but when it filled up, a second "loader" began to fill in from left to right.

Basically, when the first "loader" filled up to 100% and I expected to see the page, I was a put off by the second unexpected loader.

By any chance, do you know of the podcast The Totally Rad Show? One of the main aspects of the show is asking fans to submit fan artwork utilizing the TRS logo, with the "prize" being that they will use it in their opening segment's backdrop. Essentially, their "prize" is zero dollars plus fame and recognition.

Tell me the essential difference between what they do and what Guy Kawasaki has offered. No one is up in arms over what the guys at TRS are doing. They're in fact offering less than what Guy Kawasaki is offering. Much much less.

I'm not hurting financially by any means, though I have been wanting to create something for TRS just for fun and the possibility that they'll use it in their show. Likewise, I might actually submit something for Guy's book as well.

So I pose a simple question to you? Who are you to tell me that I shouldn't?

Amazing how simple this should be. If you don't find the $1000 prize worth it, don't participate. Likewise, don't tell someone who does see the $1000 prize worth it that he or she shouldn't participate. Market forces. Instead of seeing this as a sign of the times, they just complain. They don't seem to be able to understand that the world is a continually changing landscape. Nothing stays the same forever.

Found this. http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/30/dave-mcclure-500-startups/

This looks like the answer.

I've used ImageMagick and it works great. Though I think many average developers who don't tinker with servers would have a harder time picking it up.

At last, we have found our successor to Lord British!

This is pretty interesting, but perhaps the new question would be at what point does the thickness of a liquid slow down a swimmer. For example, there's no way a person could swim equally fast through water vs mud.

Perhaps the thickness of the syrup was not a significant enough difference to prove this.

Ideally, a user should not have to hover over something to know whether it is clickable. It is a designer's responsibility to make sure that a user can scan the page and know exactly what parts are clickable, so the user can quickly perform his or her desired action.

The end of hover will simply transfer to "onmousedown", which can be used for the same purpose of revealing a submenu.

Simply pressing down and holding for a half second could reveal a menu. And instead of a dropdown, I see the popularity of submenus expanding in a circle outside of the press, similar to Autodesk Maya, if anyone knows how that program's submenu system works. In this way, all of the submenu options are equally close distance to access rather than having to drag or move past unintended options, and would also help with the muscle memory of an intended option if the user knows that a particular item is always up or down, left or right.

Keep in mind, that (used correctly) there is a usefulness of accessing a submenu of items that allow a user to go directly to a desired page or screen without having to drill through a series of screens.